Did you turn up for work yesterday?

Finance came in 11th on the list of industries whose staff are most likely to chuck a sickie, but being naughty on Melbourne Cup day may not have hurt your career prospects. Here’s why…

According to the latest stats from psychometric testing and employee survey company onetest, banking and finance workers take an average of 0.28 non-geniune sick days (or ‘chuck a sickie’ in layman’s terms) per year.

This puts banking and finance just below government, consulting and IT – all with an average of 0.29, but ahead of construction (0.27).

Industry

Mean no. of sickies

Environment

0.43

Marketing and Sales

0.41

Hospitality Sports and Tourism

0.35

Utilities

0.32

Arts and Humanities

0.30

Research and Development

0.30

Health

0.30

Government

0.29

Consulting

0.29

Information Technology

0.29

Banking and Finance

0.28

Construction

0.27

Engineering

0.26

Accounting

0.24

Fast Moving Consumer Goods

0.24

Law

0.21

Business and Commerce

0.18

Mining Oil and Gas

0.17

Insurance

0.16

Defence

0.14

Surprisingly, onetest found that chucking a sickie is unlikely to hurt your career prospects.

The company surveyed some 2,851 Australian graduate program applicants across a range of industries 10 years ago to track how their young lifestyle choices would impacted their progression – and the results are surprising.

A decade on, the same individuals were re-surveyed and it was conclusively found that career progression isn’t impacted by taking non-genuine sick days.

Onetest head of psychology Cherie Curtis said because the humble ‘sickie’ was a known Australian tradition, questions about the number of non-genuine sick days taken by participants were added and measured against the rate of termination and promotion.

“We’ve been exploring the outcomes of people who had entered the workforce and investigated the influence of various lifestyle choices on career outcomes like satisfaction and progression,” Curtis said.

Only a very weak relationship between termination and sickies was discovered, and even less of a correlation was found between the number of sickies taken and an employee’s rate of promotion.

“These correlations are too weak to conclude that ‘chucking a sickie’ will have much of an impact on an employee’s career progression,” she said.

The study also revealed strong relationships between the rate of sickies taken and the dissatisfaction an individual had with the industry in which they work.

“We found that participants who reported feeling dissatisfied with life were 48% more likely to ‘chuck a sickie’ compared to those who were satisfied with life,” Curtis said.